Piracy, rights and legal issues are all things to consider when entering the publishing world. The growth of the Internet and digital publishing today has created a unanswered question, is copyright fit for the digital age after all? I agree with Hall that this is a 'fundamental issue for publishers, copyright has come under scrutiny since technology is expanding so rapidly'(2010, p. 142 ).
First and foremost managing the rights to any eBook file or digital format of your book would be of most importance. Copyright has slightly different issues that raise awareness; the key principle as a publisher is owning the rights to your book no matter what electronic environment it may be published into. Therefore 'DRM' also known as digital rights management has been put in place as a protection act to any copyrighting that could take place. DRM also gives the publishers control in that it allows them to track usage and collect revenues. Surely not such a bad thing after all?
However, there is a commercial and control side to copyright that needs to be considered. Creative Commons was a licence that was easily introduced on websites such as Flickr in a battle to allow users to distribute their material (images) freely while still having some control over their property. The main problem today with licence such as Creative Commons is that there is still no real control over this license and therefore it can be easily infringed at any point (Hall, 2010).
Digital piracy is the main issue or attraction for any publisher. Many publishers need to have some sort of protection in place for their author. So why attraction? Quite a few self-published authors today enjoy their work being open to piracy, which can help their publishers tackle this on-going problem. Piracy today has made it easier for pirates to download and share the digital files of any eBook or digital formatted book, digitally mainly also means globally. Globally managing a physical book is obviously far less time consuming and more manageable than over the internet. Hall stated that (2010, p. 147) 'some reports say that over 20% of all eBooks downloaded to ereaders are pirated', that’s almost a quarter of eBooks downloaded on websites such as Amazon.
What can be done in future to help stop these piracy problems? Random House one of the worlds leading publishing companies have taken piracy issues on board, Benedict Page a spokesperson for the company stated 'we have invested millions of pounds in the UK to develop, exploit - and protect - our authors' digital future.' This is a promising statement from a global publishing company and will help improve the minds for any future authors especially in the UK, that piracy is being taken more seriously and we can only hope that it will gradually start to decline.
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Bibliography:
Hall, F (2013). The Business of Digital Publishing. London: Routledge. p21-148.
[Image 1] Meadows, C. (2011). Can ads in e-books fight piracy with low
prices?.Available: http://www.teleread.com/drm/can-ads-in-e-books-fight-piracy-with-low-prices/. Last accessed [online] 14 Oct 2014.
Page, B. (2009). Random: UK legal context on digital rights 'different'. Available: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/random-uk-legal-context-digital-rights-different. Last accessed [online] 14 Oct 2014.